I'm the publisher of Forbes magazine, where I write a biweekly column called Innovation Rules. I'm also a regular panelist on cable news' popular business show, Forbes on FOX (with an average viewership of 1.2 million households per show in 2012), and frequent guest analyst on CNBC's The Kudlow Report. My 2004 book, Life 2.0, was a Wall Street Journal business bestseller. I'm also an entrepreneur, an active angel investor, and sit on three outside boards. For co-founding Silicon Valley's largest public affairs organization, the 6,500-member Churchill Club, I'm a past Northern California winner of Ernst & Young's prestigious "Entrepreneur of the Year Award." I earned a B.A. from Stanford University. I lecture up to 50 to 60 times a year on the innovation economy.

7 Reasons Why Facebook IPO Was A Bust

1. Too late.Facebook‘s shares have been dead in the water for the last 12 months. Private investors had already bid up Facebook to a $100 billion value a year ago.

2. Mark Zuckerberg’s disdain for investors. He never wanted to be a public company. This became all too obvious during the IPO road show’s crucial stop in New York when (a) Zuck hid out in the bathroom and forced the audience to wait, and (b) he took the stage wearing his hoodie. Zuckerberg’s view of shareholders is like President Obama’s view of blue collar workers. He needs them but secretly laughs at them.

3. Facebook left nothing for the common investor. The insider pig pile of PE firms and celebrity Silicon Valley angels took it all. This is a rather new, post-Sarbanes-Oxley fact and it should make Americans very, very angry. When Microsoft when public in 1986, its market value was $780 million. Microsoft’s market value would rise more than 700 times in the next 13 years. Bill Gates made millionaires of thousands of ordinary public investors. When Google went public in 2004 at a $23 billion valuation, it left less on the table for you and me. Still, if you had invested in Google then and held your stock, you would be sitting atop a 9x return. Zuckerberg and his Facebook friends took it all.

4. Europe and May. Facebook’s shares debuted in a cloudy market. Beyond Europe in 2012, May is a bad time to go public. For the past several decades, nearly all of the stock market’s gains have occurred between October and May. The canard “Sell in May and go away” turns out to be true.

5. Facebook boredom, particularly among professionals. The company says it is zeroing in on a billion members. Good for Facebook, but what I would like to know is how many Facebook users have grown bored. I have not visited my Facebook page in two months. Almost every professional person I talk to who is over 25 years old has grown bored with Facebook.

6. Facebook is not necessary. Investing in tech companies is never easy. The great Warren Buffett eschews it. The key question about tech companies is not P/E values, but necessity. I like Google, Intel, Cisco, IBM, Oracle, EMC and SAP because the world’s economy depends on them. Sure, we could live without them, but not without major disruption. The switching costs would be extremely high. (I like Apple for an altogether different reason — the 80-20 rule; 20% of customers in any field will pay top dollar for a great product. Apple may be more of a luxury than it is integral to the global economy, but Apple monopolizes the luxury category.) Facebook is not integral to the global economy and its cool brand is rapidly fading.

7. Mass social media is a crock. It is an inherent contradiction. This is why I like LinkedIn more than Facebook. It has a special purpose and therefore doesn’t feel like a time waster. FWIW, I predict the next huge win in social media will be in health care. As a health care consumer, I want to chat with people who are just like me. With similar gene structures. Who suffer from similar maladies as well as the genetic potential for similar maladies. When linking up with my “health friends” I also want a 100% guarantee that my social network won’t betray my health confidences. Would I trust Facebook to keep these confidences? Never.

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For a website that’s still growing and reaching 1 billion users, making it the largest outside of Google (maybe?), you’re going to stare at the numbers and say ‘mass social media is crock’?? Wow.

Not to mention, there have been numerous training programs that have come out (and still come out) on Facebook advertising, because it’s kicking Google Adword’s butt right now for direct response marketers like myself.

Look, the funniest part of your article was that you trying to convince me that I’m going to be more excited and looking forward to using a “social media” site about health care… rather than sharing my life with friends and family. Hilarious.

bottom line is, people’s need to connect, and be involved with other people’s lives is an innate NEED, and it’s never going to go away.

You haven’t used facebook in two months? Well consider yourself as one of the outcast.

I log onto Facebook multiple times daily, and now even more with my mobile devices. I have close 1,000 friends, which is less than a lot of people I know. And each time I log in, there is always an entire list of new status updates, check ins, pictures posted, jokes, articles, etc.

It’s nonstop, and still highly addictive.

Sorry, but this article falls flat on it’s face in convincing me as to why Facebook is not necessary, is ‘boring’, and a ‘crock’.

Maybe $28 would have been a better price, and the initial pop to $42 could settle down to somewhere in the thirties. But then there would not have been enough shares available, and Congress would be blustering about the little guy getting shut out of the market.

Facebook is an entertainment company. It competes with the internet, video games, television and movies. “Social media” is not so much competition with socializing. Newspaper, magazine and television editors decide what stories to run. I happen to like the editorial choices made by Forbes and often WSJ, but not local or national tv news. Google and Yahoo and others have news portals and I guess algorithms and big-shots make news story choices. Drudge is fun, especially with disasters.

Facebook streams run on choices for news stories are made by friends and friends of friends. So we hear what happened to people we know, rather than hearing things journalist and their editors think important (or “newsworthy” things that happened to the friends of journalists).

Mixing commerce and friends will be a challenge (like buying a used car from a friend). Finding a way for people to earn some kind of credit for posting comments on products and services they buy and use could be valuable. But money changes everything.

As to your point #7 I JUST posted a “root cause analysis” of Why Social Media Marketing Success Is Elusive for Business.

It comes down to a fairly basic few issues, 1) because of the “individual” social nature of social media there is little or no ability to create solid target markets, and 2) the social media “landscape” is so fragmented that many channels may not exist as the marketplace eventually consolidates.

I went into detail on the whole problem with the current “social media” problem here:

Why Social Media Marketing Success Is Elusive for Business http://www.r3now.com/why-social-media-marketing-successes-are-difficult-for-business/

Re: #7: I certainly hope you’re right, since I’m betting the farm that connecting with people along shared health experiences is the next big social media frontier. Our new start-up FeelAlike.com is designed to do just that.

I don’t agree to point 6. The z gen lives on social networks… and facebook is one of this. I do believe that the way businesses will be be done will be changed. Even today companies and alliances are being formed over facebook…

Maybe it will take more time to become obvious, but I do see a change coming up.

Also, why should the investors feel bad if he was wearing a hoodie? After all, money is the name of the game and all the investors wanted a finger in the pie.